


Bitter/Sweet

by Beastrage



Series: I promise you hope [2]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Blood, Character Death, F/M, Implied/Referenced Sex, Mentioned Riku (Kingdom Hearts), Non-Chronological, Past Character Death, Prequel, Unreliable Narrator, except for the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 20:07:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20570126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beastrage/pseuds/Beastrage
Summary: "Did you love her?"When you're alone together, sometimes you try loving together. At least you know you're doomed, beforehand.Kairi and Vanitas, wandering the end of the world together.





	Bitter/Sweet

**Author's Note:**

> A prequel to Points of a Star, first in this series. You don't have to read it to understand this.  
The necessary information:  
Vanitas partly merged with Ventus, before Ventus died. Kairi is a Keyblade Master. Sora is dead. Most of the KH cast is dead. Most people are dead. 
> 
> Songs I listened to, writing this: White Palace by Christopher Larkin, Hollow Knight OST and Wicked Game, the cover by Ursine Vulpine

The first kiss is an experiment, really. A smashing of lips, a quick peck exchanged between the two of them. Kairi initiates it, as she does with most things between them. 

Later kisses will be hungrier and bloodier, like they’re trying to devour each other from the inside out. Pulling both of them into something deeper, something more physical than mere kissing. But the first kiss is a gentle thing, born of pure curiosity. 

A test. 

Did he pass it? Or fail it? He’s never quite sure. 

And in the end, the answer to that question doesn’t really matter. 

  
  


“Are you...writing?”

Kairi looks up, from the book in her lap. The pen she holds quickly disappears. “Uh. It doesn’t matter. What are you doing, Vanitas?”

He smirks, swaggering up to her. Waves a finger in her face. “Don’t change the subject on me. What do you have there?”

He tugs the book free from her fingers, before she has a chance to make more excuses. 

She lets out a cry, diving for it, but he manages to hold it out of her reach. 

“Hey, I’m looking right now.”

“But it’s not finished! You  _ can’t! _ ” she outright  _ wails.  _

“Finished wh-? Oh.” Vanitas flips through the pages, catches phrases like  _ monsters stalked down the halls, searching for flesh  _ and  _ the bitterness of their shared hate hung in the air like burnt popcorn.  _

Piecing it together bit by bit. Vanitas was never good at reading, himself, but thankfully, he has some pieces of Ventus to make things a bit easier.

"Huh." He examines the page. The story unfolding on it, right before his eyes. He’s never been one for reading, but that was because Xehanort was never one for books. 

With something like this...well, maybe he could try. 

“...do you like it?” she asks him quietly. Her hands are wrapped around each other, waiting. Her shoulders tight, hunched up. Ready to protect herself. 

“Do you have more?”

She blinks. “...You like it?”

He shrugs, tries to make it casual. “Yeah. I’ll read more, if you’re gonna write more. Or something.” Hands the notebook back. 

She takes it and looks at him. Looks at him like he’s something beautiful, something impossible. 

(He’s never been looked at like that before...)

“I’ll read all of it. If you want.”

  
  


“You must know how to forge Keyblade armor. You’re wearing some after all!” She pokes at his chest. 

“Yeah, learned from Eraqus.”  _ At least, Ventus did.  _ Vanitas never did, only wore the Dark Suit he was born with. It was Ventus that insisted on going home, sneaking into the Land of Departure, to retrieve his armor.

To fight Aqua, he said. But for some reason, he never wore it even when she did, against them.

Fool. 

“Teach me.”

Those deep blue eyes, looking at him,  _ pleading  _ with him...well, he doesn’t have anything else to do. 

“Sure. We’ll forge it together.” Vanitas’ sure they can manage it, if he digs into memories that Ventus left him...really. 

(And if he smiles, at her own bright smile at her first successful forging, at gleaming pink armor under a setting sun...that’s no one’s business but his own.)

  
  


A brush of silver across the scene. Ah, the visitor again. It’s always the same between the two of them, Kairi and that silver-haired man. Riku. 

Riku comes by, every once a while. Comes when the world’s sun or moon or biggest light, whichever one they’re currently on, is close to setting. He always leaves when it finally becomes dark. 

Strange guy, with strange wings and strange markings. 

“Dream-eater,” Kairi calls him. 

Vanitas doesn’t know what that is, but he feels like he should. 

Every time Riku visits, Vanitas stays back. Sets up camp. Waits. Until Kairi comes back and the man is once more gone to the winds between worlds. 

He settles on his front, meeting her eyes across the campfire. 

“Do you love Riku?”

She gives the question some thought. Considering every facet of the situation between her and Riku. That’s what he likes about her, that she usually tries to tell the truth the best she can. 

To him, if not herself, if only because he demands that truth from her. 

“I think...” Careful with words, always so careful with words, “Maybe I did once, when we were kids. It could have been more than that, once. Now...”

She grows silent, hugging her legs to her chest. 

“He’s just a reminder. That’s all.”

“Oh.”

  
  


The rule is this: she doesn’t talk about Sora and he doesn’t talk about Ventus. Works out just fine. 

(Not really. But they’re both good at lying to themselves about that.)

She wakes up, crying and shaking in her sleep sometimes. He does too.

They don’t comfort each other. Don’t reach out to each other in the night. Just cuddle up closer to each other, ignoring the other in the process. 

(Sometimes, he wish they did.)

  
  


He doesn’t delude himself about their relationship. 

Not like she does, he thinks. Lights are awfully good at lying to themselves. Vanitas has never had that luxury, born as he was on the harshlands surrounded by the Keyblades of the dead and gone. 

Perhaps Ventus believed, once, in True Love and Friendship. (He did, once.) Before dying, unmourned and forgotten, at the hands of a Master he should never have trusted. 

Xehanort has always been good at killing dreams that aren’t his own. Squashing them underfoot, consigning them to dust. 

True Love? Vanitas doesn’t believe in it. 

Vanitas only believes in warm bodies, huddled together against the cold. Of a notebook shared between the two of them, a writer and a reader. Armor forged to last, built on the connection of heart and Keyblade. He believes in what he’s known and there’s so much now, that he knows. 

Nothing lasts forever, for Vanitas. Even being an entire person, something people tend to take for granted, didn’t last long for him. 

Will this  _ thing,  _ between him and this Princess of Heart, survive? He doesn’t think so.

Yet it’s still a surprise, when it does end.

As it always is. 

In the end. 

  
  


Vanitas isn’t there. When it happens. He only knows the aftermath. Of coming upon the scene of her corpse looking like she had been weeping, blood running down her face. Pink and gold armor scattered across the battlefield like scattered petals of some flower ripped to shreds. Violently, at that. 

There’s blood on the ground. As red as the summer strawberries she gleefully enjoyed, at their ripest. 

Riku is there. Of course. Saying nothing, just silently judging him as the Dream-eater does everyone. 

“Shut up,” Vanitas snarls at him. He runs to the corpse. The corpse with its missing hand, its sealed off arm. 

He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t cry but his face is still wet. 

Looking up, Riku’s gone.

Fine,  _ fine.  _ It’s not like they were friends. The opposite, really. 

(But Kairi and Riku were.)

(Why didn’t he stay?  _ For her. _ )

The body  _ stirs.  _ Shifts ever so slightly, with breath. His own breath catches in his throat. 

Is it...?

Eyes open and he  _ knows _ , on his knees, leaning back with bitter disappointment, it’s not her. 

“Who are you?” he asks. 

“Naminé,” are the first words to fall from the corpse-girl’s lips. She gasps once, like she’s never breathed before. “I’m Naminé.”

The tears come, fast and ugly, from those new blue eyes. Not like Kairi, not like her at all. He sits there, waiting. Biting at his lip. Waiting.

(How  _ dare _ ...)

“Failure,” he whispers to himself, to the sky. “A  _ fucking  _ failure.”

-

Naminé finally asks the question he’s been expecting from her, ever since he found her on that killing ground. 

“Did you love her?” 

“Did she love me?” he asks, instead of answering. Maybe the question in of itself is an answer. 

“Of course she did!” Naminé hisses, puffing up like a startled cat. “Why wouldn’t she?”

“Well, I can think of plenty of reasons why not,” Vanitas says, rather dryly. He pulls his knees up to his chest. His arms hug around his legs. Looks up at the stars, just risen from the depths beneath the horizon. 

“Did she love me, or did she love who I reminded her of?”

Of a boy who never had a chance to grow up, the face he now wears as his own. 

(Sora, Sora, Sora. Always in his shadow.)

The silence is damning. 

He chuckles. Laughs into his legs. “That’s okay. I think I was looking for something in her too. Something that I didn’t understand and thought she did.”

“What was that?” Naminé scoots a little closer to him. He lets her. 

Vanitas sucks in a breath through his nose, letting it out in a nearly silent sigh through his mouth. “Take your pick.” The words come out bitter. 

Funny. He didn’t mean them to be. 

He tries again. “Take your pick. There was a lot we were both looking for in each other.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Naminé’s blue eyes (like hers, but  _ not _ ) look over at him curiously. 

“You tell me. You were there too, weren’t you? The whole time?” Strange to think about, the idea that this pale paper woman sat there behind  _ her  _ blue eyes, observing them kissing each other, touching each other. Fucking each other. 

She should have told me, he can’t help but think. Should have told me of this person resting in her heart. 

I told her about Ventus, didn’t I?

“Only near the end,” Naminé says quietly, but the way she averts her eyes from him tells him a different story. 

Lights are such  _ liars.  _ Why is he so good at chasing after the things that hurt him?

He snorts, shaking his head. “Huh. Of  _ course _ .”

“Are you going to leave?”

He looks at her, at this woman born of a corpse. As pale as a corpse. Picking at the oversized sleeves of the coat he lent her with the fingers of her single remaining hand. 

Looking washed out, a ghost. Truly awful in black. 

Kairi never looked like that. 

Naminé...her eyes are wide. But she’s tense. Waiting for him to leave. Walk off into the horizon and never look back. 

Vanitas is used to people leaving. It’s strange to think that he might be the person in the position of walking off now. 

He...

“Do you want to come with me?” he asks her suddenly, breaking their awkward silence. 

She freezes. “What?”

“You heard me. Are you coming?” He offers her a hand. 

“I’m not Kairi...”

Vanitas snorts, shaking his head. “What kind of person do you think I am? You’re not Kairi because Kairi  _ is dead.  _ You’re Naminé and I thought you might want to come with me.”

“...Alright.” She stands, but doesn’t take his hand. 

Vanitas shrugs and withdraws said hand. 

Thinks out loud. 

“Did I love her?” Against his better judgement... 

“Yeah. I guess I did.”


End file.
